Note: Not directed at this thread or specific posts... just an observation of how things are going in general in this country...

This back and forth of "who is worse" is total bullshit.

Not disagreeing with you that there has to be a better way to conduct a campaign, but slinging the campaign mud is a tradition going back to the Founding Fathers.

As bad as this election may seem, it is hardly original in its biliousness. Its protagonists often appear to be reading from a borrowed script, delivering lackluster renditions of the truly inspired negative campaign tactics that have made American politics a blood sport from the start....

Compared to the elections of 1796 and 1800, this contest has all the inter-religious animosity of a Lutheran versus Methodist slow pitch softball game. In the earliest of the nation’s two-party elections, the match-up of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson gave voters a choice, according to Adams supporters, between “God and a religious president, or Jefferson and no God!” The pious allegedly buried Bibles in their gardens, in fear that President Jefferson would gather holy books for the pyre upon inauguration.

Jefferson versus Adams may also have the dubious distinction of being the first time the so-called race card was played. Even then, Jefferson’s rivals circulated rumors of his relationship with an enslaved woman ... Jefferson, the target of more conspiracy theories than even Donald Trump could shill, was later said to be "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father, as was well known in the neighborhood where he was raised."...

While some have drawn a parallel between the hidden camera tactics behind Romney’s 47 percent video and James O’Keefe’s stealth attack portraying Acorn as an enabler of prostitution, [Andrew] Jackson supporters charged that Old Hickory’s rival for the White House, the incumbent John Quincy Adams, was an actual pimp. Adams was charged with supplying an American woman to the czar when he was minister to Russia years earlier. Adams’s supporters in turn accused Jackson of bigamy....

The moral character — and intimate entanglements — of the candidates has been a common front in the battle of for the presidency. In 1884 Grover Cleveland famously dealt with taunts of “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” when news spread that he had fathered a child with a woman to whom he was not married.

Less well known is a counter-rumor that circulated about Cleveland’s opponent, James G. Blaine. Hitting the supposedly morally superior Blaine where he lived, Cleveland supporters claimed that Blaine’s first-born son, who had died as a toddler 30 years before, had been conceived before Blaine and his wife were married. In an apparent attempt to make it seem as if Blaine was hiding something, vandals chiseled the date of the child’s birth from his grave.